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She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.

Edith Wharton

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Edith Wharton
Age: 75 †
Born: 1862
Born: January 24
Died: 1937
Died: August 11
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
New York City
New York
Edith Newbold Jones
Edith Newbold Jones Wharton
Must
Ultimately
Bare
Life
Decide
Submit
Boring
Honour
Follow
Afternoon
Ready
Ignore
Chance
Boredom
Compliance
Success
Fresh
Percy
Might
Bored
Morrow

More quotes by Edith Wharton

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People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
Edith Wharton
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Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
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Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
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In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
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In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.
Edith Wharton
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Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart
Edith Wharton
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He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.
Edith Wharton
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It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
Edith Wharton
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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
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The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
Edith Wharton
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And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
Edith Wharton
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Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.
Edith Wharton
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The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
Edith Wharton
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They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.
Edith Wharton
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Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.
Edith Wharton
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... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
Edith Wharton
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Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.
Edith Wharton
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Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.
Edith Wharton
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... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.
Edith Wharton
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Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.
Edith Wharton